Bosnian Army War Memorial Blown Up

An explosion in the town of Mostar destroyed a monument to those who served in the wartime Bosnian Army, media reports said.

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Local police said that nobody was hurt in the incident that demolished the monument outside Mostar’s town hall on Sunday but refused to provide any more information while the investigation was ongoing.

Bosniak and Croat politicians in Mostar have often quarrelled over the memorial, as well as another in the town that honours members of the Croat wartime force in Bosnia, the HVO.

A year ago, a Croat association built its memorial with the approval of the town's authorities, but Bosnian Army veterans’ associations strongly criticised it, and at one point unknown attackers opened fire on the monument.

In April last year, members of Bosniak veterans’ associations erected their own memorial only metres away from the one honouring the HVO.

After the war in the 1990s, Mostar remained informally divided between its eastern, Bosniak part and its western, Croat one. Inter-ethnic incidents are often reported, particularly during sporting events.

Mostar is located in the Muslim-Croat Federation entity of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The country's other entity is Republika Srpska.

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The Balkan Transitional Justice initiative is a regional initiative which has been supported by the European Commission, the Federal Department of Foreign Affairs of Switzerland, the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office FCO and Robert Bosch Stiftung that aims to improve the general public’s understanding of transitional justice issues in former Yugoslav countries (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia).